From stopword: What we have here is the top 106 books most often marked as “unread” by LibraryThing’s users. As in, they sit on the shelf to make you look smart or well-rounded. Bold the ones you’ve read, underline the ones you read for school, italicize the ones you started but didn’t finish.

56 attempted, 45 completed.

[Hmm, I can’t seem to get underlines right. I will bold & asterisk the ones I read for school. Or in some cases, italicize and asterisk…]

Jonathan Strange & Mr Norrell
Anna Karenina
Crime and Punishment
Catch-22
One Hundred Years of Solitude
Wuthering Heights
The Silmarillion
Life of Pi : a novel
The Name of the Rose
Don Quixote
Moby Dick
Ulysses [I’m scared of this one]
*Madame Bovary
*The Odyssey
Pride and Prejudice
*Jane Eyre
*The Tale of Two Cities [It’s _A_ Tale of Two Cities!]
The Brothers Karamazov
Guns, Germs, and Steel: the fates of human societies [but I really want to read this]
War and Peace
Vanity Fair
The Time Traveler’s Wife
*The Iliad
Emma [I did see the movie, but it’s one of my less-favorite Austen stories so I never read it]
The Blind Assassin
The Kite Runner
*Mrs. Dalloway [I read it for school AND I didn’t finish it AND I wrote a paper on it anyway.]
Great Expectations
American Gods
A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius
Atlas Shrugged
Reading Lolita in Tehran : a memoir in books [And I’m really glad I did.]
Memoirs of a Geisha [on my shelf, waiting to be read]
Middlesex
Quicksilver
Wicked : the life and times of the wicked witch of the West
*The Canterbury Tales
The Historian : a novel
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man
Love in the Time of Cholera
Brave New World
The Fountainhead
Foucault’s Pendulum
*Middlemarch [This is one of the most boring books I ever read.]
*Frankenstein
The Count of Monte Cristo
Dracula
A Clockwork Orange
Anansi Boys
The Once and Future King
The Grapes of Wrath
The Poisonwood Bible : a novel
1984
Angels & Demons
*The Inferno (and Purgatory and Paradise) [I read part of it for school.]
The Satanic Verses
Sense and Sensibility [I loved the movie and really ought to read the book.]
The Picture of Dorian Gray
Mansfield Park
One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest
*To the Lighthouse [I took a college course on Virginia Woolf, only to discover that I hated Virginia Woolf’s work. Maybe I wasn’t ready for it yet…]
Tess of the D’Urbervilles [Always thought I should try this one.]
Oliver Twist
*Gulliver’s Travels
Les Misérables [Yes, the whole thing.]
The Corrections
The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay
The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time [This was excellent.]
Dune
*The Prince
The Sound and the Fury [I really like Faulkner but I’m scared of Joyce. No idea why.]
Angela’s Ashes : a memoir
The God of Small Things
A People’s History of the United States : 1492-present
Cryptonomicon [Not really excited about trying this.]
Neverwhere
A Confederacy of Dunces [Also on my shelf, never read it.]
A Short History of Nearly Everything [I thought this was awesome.]
Dubliners
The Unbearable Lightness of Being
Beloved
Slaughterhouse-five
The Scarlet Letter
Eats, Shoots & Leaves
The Mists of Avalon
Oryx and Crake : a novel
Collapse : how societies choose to fail or succeed
Cloud Atlas
The Confusion
Lolita
Persuasion [Yet another movie I loved where I really ought to read the book.]
Northanger Abbey
The Catcher in the Rye
On the Road
The Hunchback of Notre Dame
Freakonomics : a rogue economist explores the hidden side of everything
Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance : an inquiry into values
The Aeneid
Watership Down
Gravity’s Rainbow
The Hobbit
In Cold Blood : a true account of a multiple murder and its consequences
White Teeth
Treasure Island
David Copperfield
The Three Musketeers